


what the water gave me

by unveiled



Series: Snippets [15]
Category: X-Men: First Class (2011) - Fandom
Genre: F/M, M/M, Manipulations, Politics, Siblings, The Long Game
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-02-17
Updated: 2013-02-17
Packaged: 2017-11-29 15:02:04
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 900
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/688294
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/unveiled/pseuds/unveiled
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>The world's a beast of a burden.</p>
            </blockquote>





	what the water gave me

**Author's Note:**

> Canon-compliant for XMFC, but not the original X-Men trilogy. Originally posted [on Tumblr](http://thoughtsnotunveiled.tumblr.com/post/43307266795/snippet-what-the-water-gave-me).

Charles always asks after her, when they meet.

Erik sits facing him. Across a desk, a table in a dimly-lit restaurant, a park bench with a chessboard. Charles’s face is a lie, but there is value in reminding Charles that Erik is watching, and planning. Erik’s pieces move like an army. He does not prevaricate.

“How is Raven? Is she well?” Charles asks. He never says the word _sister_ , but it falls from his mouth between the syllables.

“Mystique,” he corrects Charles, the first two, four, six times.

“Raven,” Charles says. His voice is as soft as his hands.

When Erik looks at him, he sees a mutant who will not yield. A likely betrayer of their entire species. A man with thinning hair in a wheelchair. He who was once Erik’s lover.

Erik considers his words. _This_ man is a stranger, one he does not yet know as well as the man who pulled him from the sea. Charles carries the marks of his calling on his body: an elegantly-tailored suit, a child’s drawing tucked into his jacket pocket, lines of both pain and happiness at the corners of his eyes. He is long past any hurt at vulgarities on Mystique’s place in Erik’s bed.

“She is thriving,” Erik says.

“Good.” 

There is genuine warmth in Charles’s voice. It reflects in Charles’s eyes like candlelight, and dims only slightly when Erik takes his hand.

*

Charles never asks after him, on the few occasions they meet.

Their paths almost always cross by accident. Once, on a warm spring day, Mystique — in the skin of a spit-polished, Brylcreemed aide — pushes Charles’s chair past newly-planted cherry trees on the grounds of the Washington Monument. They pause at the Reflecting Pool and speak of nothing of import. 

Mystique stands next to Charles. She thinks the wheelchair is supposed to make Charles seem less intimidating. Ridiculous. She knows Charles is the most dangerous man on earth, when he cares to be.

Charles talks about his students, the ones Mystique already knows. Of Darwin returning from the dead. The boy who shoots red beams from his eyes, the one Magneto tries to recruit. The telepath who now shares Raven’s old room with a girl who calls down lightning. Banshee is teaching music. Beast is making friends.

She cannot bear to touch Charles but they lean towards each other, like two saplings tied to a frame.

“Be well, Mystique,” is what Charles says when they part, each time. “I love you.”

He means what he says, and she doesn’t begrudge him this.

“Do you want me to send word to him?” she asks, because she is curious, damn them both.

Charles presses the tips of his fingers to his mouth. “There’s no need, but thank you,” he says. “Erik already knows.”

“Magneto,” she corrects him, bristling.

“Yes,” Charles says, his voice even and uninflected, “I suppose he is.”

*

The world changes around him, around them. Charles reads of marches, riots, and shootings before breakfast, and slots the news neatly into his memory. There are more students every month. Some of them come from lands once held by empires. He begins paying attention to the television. Armando and Ororo watch a black, female officer set out into space as if she was born to it. The school pays all its teachers the same wages, and begins to teach that equality is not a utopia.

Charles does not write to Erik, or to Raven. He does not forgive them, for all that hope is an unruly, living creature in his chest. Betrayal is a habit that’s hard to shake. One day they will betray him again — or each other. 

He loves them too much not to want to trust them, nevertheless. Love is a strength he refuses to disavow, but to Erik it will always be another weapon. Erik will turn it against him, as sure as the earth’s orbit around the sun. And Raven will be his executor. Once he perceived this as if through a glass, darkly, but Charles has no illusions on the matter now.

Charles’s life has moulded him into a person of certain habits and desires, as set in his own ways as the elders disdained by youths of his time. He sees this in his students’ eyes, in the adolescent resentment that colour their thoughts. They have already outstripped him, though they do not yet believe this. Some of them will leave for Erik’s army. People are not trees that can be pruned into exacting shapes.

Some of them will stay, though. His children will have the strength Charles does not, when the day comes that Erik and Raven will spend the last of the coin he holds out to them.

It is an ill thing, to try and sow a subtle discord between Raven and Erik. Charles is out of practice at dealing with people without telepathy, but this is not a thing to be done with the power of his mutation. There is no guarantee it will work, and it will be years yet before he sees fruit. Charles is patient, though, as water winding its way through rock. He knows them well enough to try. 

Charles turns a page in his notebook and writes down: _Mutant Ethics_. A subject to add to the school curriculum, he thinks, and wheels down to the library to consider a reading list.

 

**END**


End file.
